Writing in an Age of Silence. Sara Paretsky

      Agnes’s listening to one story was not enough to give me a sense that my future lay in words. It was enough, though, to keep me writing. After Agnes listened to my story I would lie in bed imagining my parents dead and me adopted by her, taken into her school where there were only girls.

      The dream took on new dimensions in 1958, when we moved to our house in the country. At first I loved it: I finally had my own room and we went to a two-room country school—just like in Understood Betsy or On the Banks of Plum Creek. Later I came to hate it. My parents’ fights intensified and the isolation of the country made it easy to seal me off completely from friends my own age, from any activities but school and housework.

      The main line of the Santa Fe crossed the road at the bottom of the hill on the outskirts of Lawrence. There wasn’t any crossing gate or bell and every now and then the Kansas City Chief, roaring around a blind curve toward San Francisco, would annihilate a family.

      Mary and Dave would be fighting, not paying attention to the road or to the tracks. The crash would be appalling. We’d be at the house, of course, my four brothers and I, lounging around reading or maybe playing softball. We should have been doing a dozen chores—mowing the lawn (my older brother’s job), vacuuming (mine), changing the baby’s diapers (mine again) or sorting the bottles in the trash to take to the dump (my brother). I don’t need a dishwasher, Mary used to tell visitors—I have two right here. And she would point at my older brother and me.

      When we heard the car in the drive we leaped into action, attacking our chores—there was hell to pay if we were found loafing in bourgeois self-indulgence. And then we saw it was the sheriff’s car, the red light flashing. We raced over to see what he wanted, me grabbing the baby and carrying him along on my hip.

      The sheriff looked at us very kindly. He said maybe we should go sit down: he had something very serious to tell us. There’d been an accident and we were orphans now. Was there someone we could call to look after us? Of course not, we already did any looking after there was to do, but we couldn’t tell him that, and anyway, we were underage, we needed guardians.

      I would go to Agnes, to the school for irremediable girls. Even though she only took girls I would have to bring the two little boys with me, they were mine to look after (they thought I was their mother. When they started kindergarten they didn’t know what the word “sister” meant—they didn’t know that was me: they thought they had two mothers.).

      We looked solemnly at the sheriff, conjuring up tears out of shock, but we couldn’t believe it had really happened: we were really orphans. Just like Anne of Green Gables or English Orphans. Our future changed miraculously.

      And then Mary and Dave would come up the drive, still arguing, not dead at all, and we would leap into activity that was never quite frenzied enough. My older brother could never get tasks quite right, or the tasks set for him would change between when they were assigned and when he did them, and most of the yelling went his way. The rest of us slid upstairs.

      I want to say here what I couldn’t say in 1985: there was no cousin Agnes. The behaviors, and support, I ascribed to Agnes were an amalgam of my teachers and friends, as well as some adult women whom I saw interact with my parents. However, Agnes did have a very particular existence: she was my imaginary mentor.

      She came to me in the winter of 1969, during my first year of graduate school at the University of Chicago, when I shared a slum with three other students. I was twenty-one then, fat, ungainly, painfully lonely, so fearful of criticism that I seldom spoke in my classes. I’d never had a boyfriend and aside from my three room-mates I didn’t have women friends in Chicago, either. My room-mates and I shared a dismal apartment on the south side—six rooms for a hundred-sixty-five dollars a month and all the cockroaches we could eat. We killed two hundred and fifty of them one night, spraying the oven where they nested and stomping on them when they scampered out. (You’d have to be twenty-one to want to count the bodies.)

      It was never warmer than fifty-five in the building and that was a most bitter winter. The city code says it has to be at least sixty-two during the day. We’d get building inspectors out who would solemnly measure the air. Then they’d learn the landlady worked as a precinct captain for the Daley machine and their thermometer miraculously would register fifteen degrees higher than ours.

      I had gone to Kansas for the winter holiday. As usual on my visits, my mother became drunk and angry, and my father retreated into a menacing silence—he sometimes went as much as three days without speaking, but his silent presence was filled with a ferocious anger that dominated the house around him.

      I fled back to Chicago several days before the end of the winter holiday, while my room-mates were still out of town. Carrying my heavy suitcase up the stairs to the apartment entrance I blundered into the doorjamb, knocking the wind out of myself. I dumped my suitcase down and sat on it, not even going inside, so miserable with my fat, my clumsiness, my loneliness that I hoped I might just die right there.

      My two youngest brothers would care, of course, as would my friend Kathleen, but my parents wouldn’t even come to the funeral. I’d been active in social justice work both in Chicago and Lawrence; admiring community leaders came to the service to pay me homage. In my coffin I looked like a Botticelli angel, miraculously slender with long soft golden curls. The picture brought a lump to my throat.

      At that moment, Agnes came to me. Her name was Agnes Bletch; she ran a finishing school for irremediable girls, girls like me, who always spilled food on themselves while eating, and ran into doorjambs more often than they walked through doorways.

      Agnes’s school didn’t do the impossible. She didn’t train girls to eat tidily, or walk like Audrey Hepburn. Instead, she taught her students to spill food on themselves with so much élan that every other woman in the room poured soup down her dress, hoping to look half as good as the Bletchites.

      It was a long slow journey I started that January afternoon, a journey to my voice. It took another decade of writing privately, not showing my work to anyone, before I began to try to write for publication. Without the women’s movement, without my mentor and friend Isabel Thompson, who took me under her wing the following fall, and without the support of Courtenay Wright, whom I later married, I might never have had the courage to write publicly.

      The people who made up my cousin Agnes included my fourth-grade teacher, Patti Shepherd. She did, indeed, urge me to read my stories to her during the summer of 1957. She made me feel my stories meant something. My high school teachers Jayanne Angell and Bill Mullins both told me I had a gift with language; they gave me a spark of confidence in my writing, one that sent me to New York the summer of 1970, when I was twenty-three, to try to get a job in the magazine world. I failed dismally at that and returned to Chicago, but their encouragement did keep me writing—stories, poetry—all very privately for myself until I was in my early thirties and finally had the confidence to try to write my first novel.

      The adult women I watched as a child included my Aunt Mary Clare, whom my father both flirted with and was afraid of. She was a general’s daughter, and ruled her household with a feminine but firm discipline. When my uncle was stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, forty-five miles from us, they visited often. As a child, I saw how Mary Clare could charm—and intimidate—my terrifying father into behaving like a civilized person with his family.

      Finally, Emily Taylor, the dean of women at the University of Kansas, where I was an undergraduate, played a strong role in starting me on the road to rethinking where I belonged on the planet. I attended the university partly with money I had started earning at age thirteen, when I took a job as a dishwasher in a science lab, and partly with scholarships I was awarded. The most important of these scholarships was named for Elizabeth Watkins, who had to quit school at thirteen to look after her siblings and her father, and who left the fortune she later acquired to support women students.